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Soylent Campaign

campaign.soylent.me

11–20 of 608 posts

Re: Soylent Campaign

#11
I got curious about this statement: 2 million people are killed annually by smoke inhalation from indoor cooking stoves alone. This is just wrong enough to be misleading, since that figure actually includes heating, not just cooking. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs292/en/ So soylent wouldn't help in the cases where indoor pollution is caused by heating.

Re: Soylent Campaign

#12
>Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition.

Citation needed. I'm a big fan of n=1, but making these kinds of claims supported by anecdote and then asking for money based on those claims is ridiculous.

Re: Soylent Campaign

#13
It's a pity no one on the team has any experience in a relevant field, and the "Is it safe?" answer is absurd. You could say the same thing to deem cigarettes safe.

Re: Soylent Campaign

#15
I'm glad such eccentric projects are pursued – they're how progress happens – but it's still the case that...

(a) Both the 1973 Charlton Heston movie and mixed, some-negative health connotations of the word 'soy' make the chosen name for the product problematic.

(b) The argument for its safety – "We have been testing Soylent on ourselves for several months and the data shows it to have a positive nutritional benefit" – creates little confidence compared to thousands of years of alternate practice, and strong evidence the human system needs some variety/chaos for optimal health/resilience.

Re: Soylent Campaign

#16

I've been following this for a while, and I'm excited to see it start to come together. I hope a lot of people aren't turned off by this pseudo Kickstarter, and wonder why Kickstarter turned them down in the first place.

The campaign's powered on the open-source Crowdhoster platform, which is a Crowdtilt project. They recently wrote a blog post about updates to the platform: http://blog.crowdtilt.com/post/50939274192/updating-crowdhos...

Re: Soylent Campaign

#17
Some people said that it was only a matter of time before this person started charging money for this crank product, and I guess this proves them right.

He's making a number of health claims on that page. I'm curious about the legality of doing so; it's not legal in the UK unless he meets some pretty strict criteria.

> If not for this waste there would be plenty of food to adequately nourish everyone alive.

Waste food is a serious problem and something needs to be done. I'm not sure there's a connection between food waste and world hunger.

> 2 million people are killed annually by smoke inhalation from indoor cooking stoves alone

This could be an interesting problem. Why do people use really inefficient dirty open fires to cook? Why aren't they using better stoves? It's not as if a stove requires huge amounts of resources.

Re: Soylent Campaign

#19
post #4

I've been following this for a while, and I'm excited to see it start to come together. I hope a lot of people aren't turned off by this pseudo Kickstarter, and wonder why Kickstarter turned them down in the first place.

I imagine Kickstarter turned them down because of potential liability if something goes wrong. Replacing food with chemicals makes sense to scientists and engineers, but I imagine this has the potential to be lawsuit-heavy for the average people out there (my back aches, must be the Soylent). Edit: specifically, these two guidelines: - Projects cannot offer financial, medical, or health advice. - No tobacco, drugs, a…

Kickstarter is for creative projects with a finite ending point. For example, you can't launch a website and raise funds on Kickstarter so you can pay engineers -- it needs to be a concrete project, not "I want to start a company." The same is true for Soylent, it isn't framed as a project.

Re: Soylent Campaign

#20
post #8

Still doesn't answer how this is much different than just another kind of diet shake.

Most diet shakes aren't marketed as being fully nutritious. This has all the vitamins your body craves; as in I think you could eat this forever with no side effects, but that (to my knowledge) has never been tested with diet drinks (because they can claim that it's your responsibility to get the right nutrients).
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